


Death by Broom

by MagdaTheMagpie



Series: Deductions and a Touch of Magic [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Crossover, M/M, Magic, Magical Artifacts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 15:49:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4711571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagdaTheMagpie/pseuds/MagdaTheMagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade calls with a new case. It's a bit unusual.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death by Broom

Sherlock’s phone beeps with an incoming text. He reads it, looks bored and slides it back on the table, resuming whatever experiment he has going on at the moment. John tries not to look too closely when he’s having breakfast.

“Lestrade?” John asks after processing by elimination.

“Yes,” Sherlock answers, looking pleased that he bothered to deduce it himself instead of just asking him. “Boring case. High profile death in the forest. Probably a Lord gone hunting who was hit by a stray bullet. Not worth my time.”

John hums. Presented like that, it really didn’t sound all that appealing. But Lestrade is persistent and Sherlock’s phone pings again, demanding his attention. Sherlock growls in annoyance but he reads it and his petulant expression morphing into something close to amusement.

“Seems I was wrong after all,” Sherlock muses and hands John his phone.

 

**Death by broom. -GL**

 

“Is that a typo?” John asks just before the phone pings yet again.

 

**It’s not a typo. -GL**

 

“Oh. Apparently not. I take it we’re going then?” John asks, watching as Sherlock is moving stuff around on the kitchen table, supposedly clearing his experiment before they leave but there’s such a mess there, John couldn’t tell the difference if he was building a castle out of severed fingers.

“Of course we are. I’ve only had two deaths by broom before: one murder and one accident. I would have hoped this was a suicide so I could have the set, but it seems unlikely in a forest. It’s still worth seeing though. Broom inflicted wounds are-”

“Sherlock,” John sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Not good?”

“No, Sherlock. Come on, don’t you want to hurry before Anderson mucks everything up?”

That got Sherlock moving and in short order they found their way into a private stretch of land outside of London, complete with a small forest. John trudged easily through the rough terrain, having taken out his trusty old army boots for the occasion, while Sherlock was slipping about in his expensive leather loathers that were fine for London’s tarmac but utterly useless here.

“I hate nature,” Sherlock mutters, not for the first time, slipping again on the wet, muddy ground.

“And it hates you back,” John says cheerily as he catches him once more, plucking a dead leave and a twig out of his curls, wondering how they got there.

“What are you so happy about anyway?” Sherlock growls.

“It’s a nice change of scene is all. Nice fresh air, no grumpy Londoners pushing me around and it’s so quiet! Shame we couldn’t bring Roonil out for a walk.”

“I’m sure he’d hate it just as much as me. In case you forgot, he has no legs, or did you plan on giving him a bath when we got back?”

John tries imagining that, but he doubts a rat-book would like a bath any better than a real dog and with a mouth like Roonil’s… John might just bleed to death before he’d even managed to shampoo him.

“Sherlock! John!” Greg calls and John can just make him out, waving between trees to catch their attention, even though they’d had no problem following the team of officers and forensics who had trudged through the delicate underwood before them, leaving enough tracks that John had wondered if a herd of elephants had been through here too. “Glad you could make it. Higher ups are pressuring me to solve this mess for yesterday and I’m completely out of my depth here.”

“Aren’t you always?” Sherlock remarked snidely.

“That was uncalled for, Sherlock. At least Greg is smart enough to wear appropriate footwear,” John pointed out, eyeing the DI’s tall rubber boots with approval.

Sherlock sniffed disdainfully and stalked over to the body. It could have been quite the dramatic exit if he hadn’t slipped once again and wobbled a couple of steps more before getting his bearings again. John and Greg shared an amused glance before joining him. John would be lying if he said he wasn’t very curious to learn how a man minding his own business in the middle of these woods had been killed by a simple broom.

“So who is he, this guy? Must be pretty important for getting all this attention,” John says waving at all the people milling about, more so than usual. Some don’t even look like they belong to the Met and don’t blend in very well with the bucolic decor in their sharp dark suits and sunglasses.

“Garrett Mallory, Secretary of State for Transports. Superiors suspect he was targeted for pushing for a controversial bill. I just need Sherlock to do his thing, his evidence is always irrefutable. I’ll just shove it in the superintendent's face and be done with it, let them deal with all this nonsense. As if I don’t have real murders to solve, honestly.”

John’s eyebrows raise in surprise at the outburst.

“I’ve rarely seen Lestrade pissed off like that before,” John whispers to Sherlock when they’ve caught up to him.

“That’s because he loathes it when politics are involved,” Sherlock explains. “Completely understandable. They probably pulled him off all his other cases so he could deal with this one.”

“You only say that just because you can’t bother to learn the Prime Minister’s name yourself,” John teases, but low enough that no one else will hear. He’s learned his lesson after the whole solar system fiasco. Sherlock is still miffed about that whenever someone mentions it.

Sherlock hums, neither an acknowledgment nor a denial of the fact. Instead, he glares pointedly at a white obscenity standing out like a sore thumb in the middle of the too green forest where the corpse should be.

“Way to ruin a crime scene,” John mutters, staring at the white sheet covering the body, not flat as he was used to, but standing up like a tent. “Impaled, I take it?”

Greg nods.

“Right through the abdomen. But go on, take a look, it gets weirder.”

That’s all the invitation Sherlock needs to pull off the sheet in one dramatic swish, letting it billow and flutter through the air before rolling it into a messy ball and throwing it at Anderson’s back who’s busy collecting… whatever. The body is much more interesting and John leans in over it with Sherlock who starts rattling off his deductions absent-mindedly.

“In his sixties. Married, thirty years. Happily married, for a change. Doing well financially, enough to live well, but not too much that he would attract unwanted attention on that count. Smokes cigars, not cigarettes. Collects stamps as a hobby, as well as bird watching.” Sherlock sighs. “Common. Dull. Boring. The fatal wound to the abdomen, now that is interesting. What would you say, Doctor?” Sherlock asks cheekily, a habit he’d kept since their very first case together, when John had no idea what he was even doing there. John knows he mustn’t look at Sherlock or they’ll start giggling over the body and Greg was never happy about that, said it set a bad example to his men, so John obligingly crouches down next to the man’s torso and carefully examines the wound. It’s very large, and deep. Really very deep, as if… Sherlock clears his throat, impatient.

“One single thrust of the broom. It must have demanded a lot of force because it went right through his body and pinned him to the ground. He’s not only been impaled, he’s been pinned to the ground like a bloody butterfly tacked on a board. The angle is… wait, that can’t be right...  ”

Sherlock’s eyes sparkle when John looks at him.

“What? What is it?” Lestrade asks, hovering over them.

“Well, either the murderer stabbed him from atop a twenty foot high ladder,” Lestrade rolls his eyes at John’s more than unlikely theory. “Or he was lying down when he was attacked.”

“Lying down on his back to do some birdwatching? Here? I’m no expert but I don’t think that’s how it’s done,” Lestrade says.

“No, he was definitely standing, or they wouldn’t be these blood trails down his jacket here. The blood follows gravity and movement. If he had been lying down, it would have pooled around the wound and if it bled enough, overflowed to the sides.”

“Ah, right. I see that now. Brilliant. So we need to look for a ladder?” John asks jokingly.

“There are more than enough trees around, but it would be highly impractical. If there was only the shaft and not all this… stuff at the end,” Sherlock says pointing at the curved bristles. “I would have thought the weapon had been used as a javelin. It would explain the angle, the force, how the killer attacked from afar without the use of a ladder,” he finishes winking at John.

“It is a bit of a weird broom,” John acknowledges.

“Is it? I’m not familiar with the implement.”

“Of course you’re not. But look at it. The shaft is rather large and looks sculpted but it’s not even straight, not very practical as a javelin, and there’s these weird metal parts attached to it. And the head? The bristles are all...styled. And stiff. I couldn’t sweep the kitchen with that thing if my life depended on it.”

Sherlock steepled his fingers, still crouching over the body, before shooting up and hollering at Anderson to clean this mess.

“I want to see the broom when you’ve extracted it. We’ll meet you at Barts.”

“That’s all?” Lestrade asks, looking disappointed.

Sherlock doesn’t bother to reply, just strides away with his coat billowing behind him. John shrugs at Greg, but on the ride back, he looks at Sherlock quizzically.

“Not that I think you have to solve every case Lestrade foist onto you the minute you get there, but it’s rather uncharacteristic for you to leave without giving him anything to go on.

“I think that may be a problem,” Sherlock says.

“You mean you really don’t have a clue about this case?”

“I think I know enough, but not anything that can be shared. I think it’s another one of those anomalies we’ve come across lately.”

“Oh,” John said, his mouth making a perfect O of surprise. “You mean like-” he stopped, looking in the cabbie’s direction before leaning closer to Sherlock and whispering: “The shrinking candy and the monster-book?”

Sherlock nods in agreement.

“It’s a weird broom, granted,” John said. “But it’s just a broom, isn’t it?”

“Those metal bits at the end, they’re adult-sized stirrups.”

“Stirrups, you mean like... for riding a horse? But on a broom?” John couldn’t help but visualize it. “Tell me you’re not thinking about witches?”

“It would explain the other two artefacts. Magic. It actually makes sense. Can you imagine, John? A  whole new world out there to discover.”

John wants to say that he can’t be serious… but it does make sense. It explains why they have sweets that make you temporarily shrink as well as your clothes; why they now have a hybrid of a book and a giant rat living under their sofa that eats their shoes for breakfast.

Magic!

It’s hard to accept, to even wrap his mind around, but it makes perfect sense. It makes his heart jump, the little boy in him rejoicing that the stories he read as a kid could be true, and even Sherlock seems alight with childish glee.

  


They have to wait an hour for the broom and body to arrive and Sherlock curses Anderson for being deliberately slow and stupid. Molly takes charge of the body, surprised Sherlock is more interested in the broom that came with it but seeming relieved she can do her job without him hovering over her for once. John is only too glad she got over her crush so it didn’t make things awkward between them.

Sherlock unwraps the broom reverently. The top part of it, the one that was had speared through the unlucky man and deep into the hard forest ground, is broken and splintered along the shaft but they carefully and methodically clean the pieces before putting them all back together again. Molly checks on them and sighs in relief when she realizes she wouldn’t have to do that part herself because she was pants at jigsaws. But it was worth the effort: the broom’s handle had been engraved with the words: Cloud Drifter.

They share a look, grinning like two mischievous boys who have just found a treasure at the place the map is marked with a big X. It’s even better that it’s a secret that belongs just to the two of them.

“You know, John, if this is a flying-broom…”

“...then where is the flyer?” John finished.

“The trees? Maybe he had an accident. Like we’d have with a car, or rather a bike, given the size.”

“But this one goes up in the clouds. I’d bet it goes a lot faster than a bike too. It would also explain the impaled Minister.”

“Then the probability the flyer is dead is very high. Going at that speed through a forest...” Sherlock says, his hands smashing together loudly. John grimaces while Sherlock whips out his phone and quick dials. “Lestrade, look in the trees for another body, on a north-east axis, look as far as one mile in both directions. I’m not sure whether he fell before or after.”

“What? We were about to pack up. Sherlock!” came Lestrade’s annoyed voice from the other end, but Sherlock ignored him and ended the call.

“What if Lestrade finds a witch? Or a...sorcerer? Wizard?”

“He wanted the culprit, he’ll have one, even though the death was accidental. That should satisfy everyone. And whoever it is will be dead, it’s not like he can hocus pocus Lestrade, so stop worrying.”

As if to give reason to Sherlock, his phone pings a quarter of an hour later and he shows John the message.

 

**I have no idea how you figured that out, but we found the second body hanging from a tree half a mile back, just as you said. Bringing it in. You have some explaining to do. -GL**

 

John manages to convince Sherlock they might as well wait in the cafeteria upstairs and Sherlock reluctantly agrees, for his sake he gathers, but John still manages to get him to eat a blackberry muffin and some godawful tea. However, after over an hour with no news from anyone, even Sherlock starts to worry and he texts Greg.

 

**Are you planning on bringing in the body soon, or are you giving it the scenic route? -SH**

**Hello to you too, Sherlock. And I have no idea what you’re babbling about. Are you high on nicotine patches again? -GL**

 

John pales as he reads the text and he grabs Sherlock’s phone to send another text.

 

**Where are you right now? -JW**

**Sharing phones now? That’s cute. I’m at my desk, murders have been piling up like crazy lately. Care to get Sherlock to help out? -GL**

 

John looks up at Sherlock, eyes wide, before their gazes travel downwards, as if they can see the morgue through the concrete, two floors down. In an instant, they’re scrambling out of their chairs and running through corridors and stairs to reach the morgue.

“What’s gotten into you two?” Molly asks in a shrill voice, holding her heaving chest after they burst in through the doors. “You almost frightened me to death. I know the morgue is empty right now but I’d rather not be the next body in it.”

She chuckles and stops suddenly when she catches their dark expressions.

“What? What’s happened?” she asks again, more serious this time.

“Garrett Mallory,” Sherlock demands. “Where is his body?”

Molly frowns.

“I don’t have anyone by that name. I’ve already processed last night’s earlier this morning.” Her frown deepens. “Wait, isn’t that the Transport Minister’s name?”

Sherlock nudges John, muttering that the broom is gone too and they leave in a hurry, not bothering to give Molly and explanation they don’t have.

“We didn’t imagine all of that, did we?” John asks once they’ve found an empty room where they can gather their thoughts.

“Which part? That we went to a crime scene in the woods this morning or that no one else but us remembers it?”

“I- Wait… No, we did go. Look at your shoes, they’re covered in mud and I don’t usually take out my army boots,” John reasoned calmly before he was baffled again by Sherlock’s next exclamation.

“Boots!”

“What? Sherlock, you lost me again.”

But Sherlock was too busy sending another text so he read over his shoulder.

 

**What shoes are you wearing today? -SH**

**Boots, actually, although I can’t remember why. Must have left in a hurry this morning. -GL**

**Are they muddy? -SH**

**No. What’s this about Sherlock? I’m swamped right now, I don’t have time for your games. -GL**

 

“Aha!” Sherlock said triumphantly.

That made no sense to John. People, whoever those people were, managed to wipe dozens of minds  clean of that morning’s events, reinsert their owners into their everyday life and even cleaned away all evidence, including two dead bodies, but they couldn’t think to swap the DI’s footwear to something more appropriate? That seemed unlikely. It would be the equivalent of successfully concealing a murder but leaving a note saying you did it.

“Hypnosis?” John asks, trying to be rational despite the events.

“Something like it, but more powerful… faster, and that can affect groups of people who are not completely gullible. Anderson aside. Interesting.”

“Worrying,” John mutters. “Why not us, though? We were there too.”

“We’re not officially on the case. We weren’t on the crime scene, nor in the morgue, when whatever happened...happened.”

“So, we just got lucky then? We could have had our minds wiped clean too? Maybe they’re still looking for us…”

John bit his lip. What had been a fun fairytale moments ago was turning into a nightmare filled with villains lurking in the dark waiting to grab you.

“No,” Sherlock said, taking his hand to squeeze it reassuringly. “They were fast and efficient about it. “If they knew about us, they would already be here. But now, we know they’re there and that they’re not necessarily friendly. They’re going to great lengths to hide themselves.”

“A secret society…” John muses, back on the tracks of fairytales. “How many of them do you suppose there are?”

“Enough to have brand names and mass produced objects,” Sherlock says.

“Cloud Drifter,” John realizes. “And Roonil! The Monster Book of Monsters! The candy!”

“Yes,” Sherlock agrees looking so excited by the mystery he might just burst at the seams. “Hundreds of them, at the very least.”

“So what do we do now?” John asks, wanting to unravel this mystery just as much as Sherlock, but dreading that his detective would want to run head first into people with mysterious powers who could mess up his mind palace.

However, Sherlock advises caution for once and they make discreet inquiries into Garrett Mallory. It’s not difficult, he’s a public figure and they soon learn he died of an unfortunate accident while bird gazing in the woods, ‘slipped and fell’, no further inquiry necessary, which made John wonder what could have possibly happened to the gaping hole in his torso.

They also visited every officer and technician they could recall seeing at the crime scene. John was more useful this time around since Sherlock never bothered to remember anyone’s name or face if they weren’t either the victim or a suspect. But, although a few of them seemed a bit confused as to why they were wearing boots or what they had done with their morning, they eventually just shook it off, as if it wasn’t worth the effort to remember. It was a bit eery to witness.

In the end, they hit a dead end anyway. They had no way to find any proof of the broom incident, or of the people who did magic, and only found discrepancies no one seemed interested looking into. Greg was even getting annoyed at them for sticking their noses everywhere. So they returned home, Roonil greeting them by wagging his appendages and tasting their shoes. Sherlock gave him his to eat since they were ruined after their trek through the woods anyway and their pet disappeared under the sofa again, making the most unappetising sounds imaginable.

John was somewhat glad the broom had been taken away by the magical people because he had the impression Sherlock would have liked to hang it above the chimney as a trophy, which would have been a bit difficult to explain to their visitors. Not to mention John thought they already had more than enough magical items in their home as it was. Between that and Sherlock’s experiments, living here was more than a little hazardous for your health.

  
  



End file.
